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Shiki-Jitsu
is a 2000 Japanese film based on a Ayako Fujitani novel and directed by Hideaki Anno. Fujitani is the half-Japanese daughter of American action star Stephen Seagal. The story was inspired by the difficult time she had while living in the US during the filming of the 1998 Seagal movie The Patriot. Plot Days 1-2 An anime director (Shunji Iwai) leaves Tokyo to return to his hometown where he meets a strangely-dressed girl (Ayako Fujitani) sitting on the railroad tracks. We later see him trying to buy cigarettes at a small shop with her sitting outside, having followed him there. The shop doesn't have any so the girl gives him a pack. She explains that she was sitting on the tracks as part of her "ritual", but the purpose of it is a secret. She then asks him "Do you know what tomorrow is?" When he admits he doesn't she says explains, "Tomorrow it's my birthday." The next day he returns to the railroad tracks with a small gift and a flower but she knocks them out of his hands with her red umbrella and once again tells him, "Tomorrow is my birthday." Day 3 The director decides to keep pursuing her as a way to get beyond his recent apathy and restlessness. He feels as if his time spent creating fictions had hindered his ability to accumulate actual life experience. While at a playground he asks her some questions about herself and it's established that she carries the red umbrella because she believes it protects her and that it's her dream to some day disappear completely. An animated sequence shows her standing at the intersection of two sets of railroad tracks angled toward each other. Two speeding trains get closer and closer until they finally reach her simultaneously, leaving only the umbrella behind. When they're about to part for the day she tells him "Tomorrow is my birthday, so I'd rather not be alone." Day 4 The girl brings the director home. She has an entire abandoned seven-floor department store building to herself in the commercial district of the town. She plays a series of answering machine recordings of her mother. The first few berate her for being a selfish uncaring daughter and the final one is suddenly nice, mentioning that it's the girl's birthday tomorrow and then asking her if she could come home. The girl tells the recording "Yes." and shuts it off. She then tells the director she doesn't want to be alone on her birthday and gives him a key to her place. Day 5 It's raining and the director can't find the girl at the railroad tracks or inside her building. He notices her up on a rooftop staring straight ahead. When he asks what she's doing she replies, "Rainy days are days for my father and sister. They're both dead." The director's voice-over explains that he longs to ease her sadness and anxiety to atone for his past. She asks him if he knows what tomorrow is and for the first time he gives a quick definitive answer that it's her birthday, causing her to smile. He sleeps on her couch for the night and the next day he gets to see more of her daily ritual. Day 6 The director is awoken by the telephone time announcement played through a loudspeaker. At exactly 6am the girl gets up and turns on an array of fans that cause rows of wind chimes to chime at once. She gives him a tour of all the floors, referring to them all as "The secret 4th floor", "The secret 3rd floor", etc. When he asks about the basement she exclaims, "No good! That's absolutely secret! You can't go in there!" When they get to the roof she tells him she goes there to check if she's "still okay". She climbs onto the ledge and says, "The sky is pretty. The stars are pretty. The moon is pretty. The light is pretty. If I don't exist, everything is pretty. Maybe it's better if I didn't exist. How about my blood? Maybe it's pretty. Maybe I'll look." There's a brief pause and after announcing that she's still okay she climbs down. Day 7 The director and the girl set up a slot car racetrack. The girl says she likes cars because her big sister did. She asks the director about his life back in Tokyo but he gives very vague answers that he had some tough times but they weren't that important. Suddenly the phone starts ringing and she stares straight ahead with a frightened look on her face, not saying a word until it stops. He says it must be a wrong number and she asks about his job. He tells her that his work exhausts him so he's been staying away, and that he plans to make live-action films. Day 8 The director begins filming the girl as part of a documentary. His voice-over reaffirms his intentions to stay around the girl as much as possible, fearing any negligence on his part could cause have disastrous repercussions. This quote, surely inspired by Hidaeki Anno's own migration from anime to live-action films, describes his need to film her: "Images, especially animation, simply embody our personal and collective fantasies, manipulating selected information and fictional constructs. Even live-action film, recording actuality, does not correspond to reality. Conversely, reality, co-opted by fiction, loses its value. The inversion of reality and fiction. None of this matters to me anymore. My consciousness, my reality, my subject, all converge in her. Certainly, she longs to escape into fantasy. Certainly, I long to escape from fantasy." Days 9-10 The director continues filming his documentary on the ninth day, capturing more of her ritual behavior on film. The next day while filming she finds an adult magazine on the ground and starts leafing through it. She asks him if he likes that sort of thing and jokes about the content of the magazine, reading lines out loud and continuing to press him on how he feels about it. Eventually her mood shifts and she throws the magazine to the ground, visibly upset. She asks him if he likes sex and he evades the question by saying he doesn't dislike it. She says she doesn't like it because if you do, you're nothing more than a male and female - just like everyone else. Later he gets a call from someone at work and the girl gets visibly upset, thinking it was some woman. That night he goes down to the basement, which is completely flooded except for a small wooden ramp to walk across. The walls are lined with red umbrellas and there is a shrine against one wall. He finds the girl curled up in a bathtub in the center of the room muttering something to herself about it raining tomorrow. He attempts to light a candle on the shrine and the girl stops him by dumping a bucket of water over his head and yelling "What are you doing? Tomorrow is my birthday!" before crawling back in the bathtub. Days 11-12 On the 11th day it rains and the girl's behavior gets even more erratic. The director infers that there must be something about rain that causes all her negative emotions to come bubbling to the surface. He becomes resigned to the fact that she still wants to die. The twelfth day starts out better, however. She decides to give him an official tour of the basement, calling it her "secret ritual space", which she keeps flooded on purpose. She decides instead of bringing an umbrella with her today she'll bring a video camera, like the director. While walking by the railroad tracks she asks him if he likes them. He says he does, because they're mechanical and fixed to only go to one place - relieving the pressure of having to choose a destination. She explains that she also likes them, because they never touch but always stay together. Later, while laying on the tracks and reading a book alone, a car stops and a man stares at her menacingly. She gets frightened and reaches for her umbrella and realizes she only has the camera. She runs away and the director sees her pass by but has no idea what happened. Days 12-21 For the next week the girl completely ignores the director's presence and focuses most of her attention on a cat she brings home to keep herself occupied. On the 20th day the cat runs away, sending the girl into a panic. She leaves for the rest of the day and comes back the next day, screaming that she's become her mother. She has a nervous breakdown in her ritual room after which she asks the director to promise never to leave her alone again and be with her on her birthday forever and ever. Days 22-27 The girl wakes up in the same bed as the director, and for the first time she realizes she's slept later than 6am. She wakes him up and brings him to the roof, where he begs her not to climb on the ledge. She does anyway but holds his hands as she does, climbing back down quickly this time and giving him a hug - telling him that his heartbeat now tells her she's okay. They visit an amusement park and she tells him that she's not scared to fall asleep anymore because he's around. The next few days aren't shown but there is a montage of her saying "Tomorrow is my birthday" over and over again followed by the director waking up startled, possibly signifying that her ritual days have started to wear on him mentally. Day 28 The director has grown tired of re-living the same day over and over again, and wants the girl to be able to move on. She notices his escalating depression and it causes her to get upset. When his cell phone begins to ring and he looks at the caller ID, only to ignore the call she mutters, "Some day that will happen to me." Later when he leaves to go to the store she worries that he hates her. She starts to listen to her mother's answering machine messages again and has an argument with them as if her mother was in the room. When the director returns she hugs him and through voice-over he admits that her heart may be too delicate and vulnerable for him to ever be able to ever embrace the darkness inside of it because he can't shake the anxiety it causes in himself. He's left once again feeling helpless. Day 29 The ritual day goes on once again as normal. The director feels the pull to do something to change things, but considers that just an idle thought for the time-being. Later, someone who knows the director begins talking to him and another man on a bicycle (Jun Murakami) seems to recognize the girl. When she sees him she begins to run and he chases her down, asking her to give something back to him to which she responds, "I'm not my sister!" She stomps on his foot and gets away. Later that day the director receives a call inviting him to a reunion of old friends and he goes. When he gets back the girl doesn't believe he was at a reunion and assumes he was out with some girl. She knocks over his phone and when he tries to pick it up she pushes him down, climbing on top of him. She asks if he's ever kissed anyone and when he says yes she says, "Maybe I haven't ever." She then asks if he's ever killed anyone. He replies, "No... maybe in my head." She says, "Me too." He kisses her and she asks him if he wants sex. Adding, "If I have sex with you, will you stay forever?" She then starts crying, saying "If I do this, I'll become my sister." Later, she wakes up and starts reading some of his work and calling the numbers on his cell phone. She gets angry when one of the people that answers is a woman. He wakes up and sees her huddled up on the floor, obviously upset. She asks him if he's only with her because he has to be for work and later asks about the woman on the phone. He tries to assure her that the woman is nobody. She once again asks him to promise not to leave and tries to listen to his heartbeat but claims she can't hear it anymore. Seemingly completely exhausted, he mutters "What makes you like this?" We hear the phone ring again later, something that's been happening randomly throughout the film. Day 30 This day begins with the girl dressed up as, and pretending to be her sister. She explains to the director that when they were children their parents split up and the father walked out on them completely, later turning up dead with a new woman. He asks her if it rained that day. She says no, and explains it was a fire and it happened on her birthday. He then asks about their mother and she says a streetcar hit her, and that she was a terrible person who blamed everyone else for her problems. She explains that the mother always compared her sister to her, and those comparisons make it hard for her to learn to like herself. She then invites the director to come with her as she visits someone. She takes him to see that man on the bike that chased her earlier. She still pretends to be her sister around the man but he knows it's not. He also mentions that she's ranted about having killed her before. We see a clip of her from the night her cat ran away. She went to his place to ask if he's seen it and he yells at her for always coming back and leaving all the time. While yelling at her he tells her, "Want to be like your sister? Well you already are. Sleep around, get knocked up. Spitting image of that sister you love." It flashes back to present-day and they argue some more. He tells her that her sister used to tell him that she was scared of her. When the girl gets home she smashes the shrine in her ritual room that had a blue guitar on it. She then sets fire to the guitar and the collection of blue slot-cars she had, all of which had been previously mentioned in relation to her sister. Later that night the phone rings. The director sees two drawings on the wall. One shows a woman with a happy face, and the other shows a woman with a scowl and a spear stuck through her back. He touches the picture and the wall falls down, revealing an entire wall behind it covered in the same large photo of a woman repeated over and over. After a brief pause, he reluctantly answers the phone. Later we see him walking toward the girl at the railroad tracks. He tells her she had a phone call and that it was her mother. She whispers to herself, "She's still alive. I gotta kill her." She then denies it's possible because her mother is dead. He tells her it's true and that she'll be coming the next day to visit her. She had told him that she tries calling her all the time. She gets angry at him for answering his phone but he tells her it's what's best for her. She yells at him and walks away. He tells her not to run away and then says, "You run away from everything you don't like, and wind up in your own little world! You just deny everything you don't like. That's why you want everyone to go away!" She tells him to go away again and when he won't she asks him why she's still there. He tells her it's because he wants to be with her, and that he likes her. She doesn't believe him but he keeps repeating "I like you." over and over again. Later she tells him that her mother drove her father away and she tried not to let her drive her away too. On her birthdays her mother got her red shoes and a red umbrella when they went shopping together - the first things she ever got that weren't her sister's hand-me-downs. They matched her mother's but her mother threw hers away, saying that they were old and she didn't need them anymore. When she saw her mother do that she thought, "She'll do that to me some day." and even though she's scared of being alone she's also scared of her mother so that's why she cursed everyone to drive them away. She believes the curse will be fulfilled on her birthday, so she keeps re-living the day before her birthday. Her mother wouldn't go away though, so she kept killing her in her mind over and over again. Suddenly she realized she had to leave, so she started dressing up. She worries about what will happen when tomorrow comes, and the director tells her that you can never know what will happen tomorrow, other than that they'll still be together. Day 31 We see the girl sitting across from the mother (the same woman in the pictures all over the wall) with the director in the middle. The girl tells her that she feels like she cared for her sister more than her, and left her alone too much. The director asks if the sister passed away and the mother says she's still alive. She then apologizes for being a bad mother in the past and being selfish and complaining too much. She starts crying and begs her daughter to come live with her again because she's lonely. The girl sees this as selfish and starts to yell at her mother for ignoring her for all the years when she was lonely. The mother apologizes over and over, begs her to come home one more time, and then runs out sobbing. The girl is left wailing and the director says, "Wake up from your dream? Or is this part of your dream? Are we still dreaming a dream? But this is our reality. Your reality. Your birthday will come, on the day you were born." She stops crying for a brief moment and smiles. He asks her to please smile again and after a few moments she thanks him. Day 32 The director and the girl open the shades together, letting natural light into the building for the first time in the film. She circles a day on her calender, which has recently been taped back together. He asks her what day that is. She tells him "December 7th - my birthday" and smiles. Cast * Shunji Iwai ... Director * Ayako Fujitani ... Girl * Jun Murakami ... Girl's ex-boyfriend * Shinobu Ōtake ... Girl's mother * Suzuki Matsuo ... Man (voice) * Megumi Hayashibara ... Woman (voice) External links * Shiki-Jitsu review at Nippon Cinema * Shiki-Jitsu review by George Chen * Shiki-Jitsu at Wikipedia Category:Directed by Hideaki Anno Category:Drama Category:Released in 2000